What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) Mike Rothschild has spent years studying the rise of QAnon and antivaccine conspiracism. After his house in Altadena, California, burned down, he found himself mired in similarly sticky webs of misinformation. On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up frustration, anger, blame, and anguish. As I sat there listening to one horror story after another, I almost felt sorry for the very polite consultants who were being paid to sit there, and who couldn't do a thing about what they were hearing. Hosted by a third-party arbiter at the behest of Los Angeles County, the gathering was a listening session in which survivors could "share their experiences with emergency alerts and evacuations" for a report on how the response to the Eaton Fire months earlier had succeeded and failed. It didn't take long to see just how much failure there had been. After a small fire started in the bone-dry brush of Pasadena's Eaton Canyon early in the evening of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the raging Santa Ana winds blew its embers into nearby Altadena, the historically Black and middle-class town just to the north. By Wednesday morning, much of it was burning.

People who think an almighty deity created the world are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, scientists have discovered. Experts found the religion or God a person believes in is irrelevant, believers are still more likely to think the moon landing was a hoax or JFK was killed by the CIA. Scientists claim the'previously unidentified' link between the two is down to a brain bias that connects unrelated events. Teleological thinkers are willing to accept statements such as'the sun rises in order to give us light' and'the purpose of bees is to ensure pollination' as true. They hope that drawing the link between the two errors in rational thinking can highlight the'major flaws of conspiracy theories'.